


Leo's Death

by orphan_account



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-03-31 23:57:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13986066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: After Leo's death, Raph begins to notice strange occurrences around the house ... drug usage tw. Repost.





	Leo's Death

It was a little over a month after Leonardo’s death that Raphael began to notice. At first, the very house itself felt dead, no longer the warm home he had shared with his older brother, his lover, his husband, for the last 25 years, but a frigid and broken shell. Just like Raphael was. A shell of what had been, a shell of his former self, the house a mockery of his former life. It looked the same, sure, but if you dug deep, if you opened your heart and _really_ looked, it was plain to see that both were fundamentally changed and devoid of the warmth and life that defined them when Leonardo was still alive.

At first, Raph couldn’t notice anything at all. He didn’t know what to do with himself; the pain of Leo’s loss cast a shadow over the entire family, but no one felt it like Raphael had. As his father had once said, Leonardo’s absence had always been particularly difficult for him, and Leo wasn’t in some fucking rainforest playing hero to a podunk town; he was _gone_. Dead. He wasn’t coming back for Raph to scream at, to hit, to lay all of his frustrations into. They were his and his alone now, and he had to deal with them himself, in his own way.

Cocaine. That was his first choice. Alcohol had replaced water in his life, and crawling into the bottles was no longer enough to distract him from the gaping hole in his existence. A downer. A depressant. That’s what booze was; he needed something else. Euphoric. Something that would make him feel _good_ , though the idea itself was fucking ridiculous. How could he feel good when Leo was gone?

At first, he thought it was the drugs. He was doing shit and forgetting about it. He’d come downstairs and Leo’s teacup would be on the table. He’d roll his sorry coked up ass out of bed and turn around to find it made up. Doors would lock that he didn’t remember locking; he never locked the doors anyway. He always said he’d deal with anyone who was stupid enough to come into their house, but Leo would rather avoid the fight to begin with and dead bolted all of the doors. Locked the windows. Doors would slam and the lights would flicker, bulbs exploding in their sockets, when Raph found a way to shoot himself up or came home from Casey’s twitching and tweaked with powder on his bloody nose.

Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe he was going crazy, but after a few months of increasingly bizarre occurrences he couldn’t quite explain, including and leading up to the burn out of the light bulbs in the bathroom and the appearance of the word “STOP” on the fogged mirror, Raphael was forced to conclude that Leo was haunting him and he was _pissed_. He’d open the bathroom cabinet and find his stash gone or destroyed, the rubbing alcohol tipped over to pour over the powder. He’d reach for a bottle and it would shatter in his hand, the shards slicing into his skin as Raph stared, dumbfounded, into the darkness. Where Leo was. Had to be. Somewhere in the darkness, in the silence. That was Leo.

It got steadily worse. Raph was still sure he was crazy, perhaps from the drug abuse, perhaps from loneliness and grief, as he pulled himself into bed, sniffing and scratching at his raw nose, and fell into an uneasy sleep.

When he awoke, the bedroom door was gone.

It was just … _gone_. There was smooth wall where it had been, he was sure it had been, when he went to sleep. His hand touched the wall uncertainly, but it was solid. IT was real. The door was … just not there anymore. Raph turned around; the windows were gone. The bathroom door was gone. There was just … wall. Just smooth wall all the way around the bedroom that he, until recently, had shared with his husband. His dead husband. Who was haunting him and imprisoning him within their house, apparently.

Something in Raph’s brain twitched, and his mouth turned into a scowl. He fucking hated the supernatural. Hated ghosts. And, at the moment, hated his brother’s ghost.

“Are you kidding me!?”

There was no response. Raph slammed his fist into the wall, feeling the bones creak and crack under the skin, blood blossoming up to bruise his knuckles. The house didn’t respond.

“What the _fuck_ , Leo!? Jesus fuck, ya gotta control everything even after yer _dead_!?”

If anyone in the family heard him screaming, they’d probably think he was crazy. Maybe he was crazy.

“I hafta leave! Ya can’t just keep me here! What about food? What about money? I gotta pay the bills and shit. They’ll… turn the fuckin lights off!”

For a long moment nothing and then the lights flickered briefly, off and on, and Raph could practically feel Leo’s smug smirk as his own mouth fell open with incredulity. He’d sulked around for a few hours before falling back into fitful sleep. When he’d awoken, the door was back again.

That was how it went, and Raph eventually stopped using the cocaine and adjusted to this new life. He’d told Don and Mikey and they’d both smiled at him sadly, like they thought his sorrow was making him lose his marbles. Maybe it was. Maybe he was insane. But he’d rather be insane and sitting at the table with Leo’s steaming teacup across from him, his husband’s strong presence palatable in the room, than sitting alone with no company save for the tangled knot of despair and grief and heartache and teardrops.

  



End file.
